Re: The remaining issues list

Joe English (joe@trystero.art.com)
Wed, 22 Mar 95 13:14:25 EST

Terry Allen <terry@ora.com> wrote:

> | | The <DIV> element.
> | Joe English <joe@trystero.art.com>
> | DIV element -- I believe there was consensus on this.
> | Peter Flynn <pflynn@curia.ucc.ie>
> | Stick with <div class="chapter"> etc for the moment. Going for
> | fully-fledged <div0> <div1> etc is probably too much for the user
> | community.
> | [disagreements still - Lee]
>
> DIV might be put off till after 2.1, I'd say. If DIV may contain
> any block elements, and does not enforce hierarchy, what concrete
> and immediate need is there for it (a query, not a challenge)?

While <DIV> does not *enforce* hierarchy (nor do I think it should),
it allows authors to *encode* hierarchy, for which HTML 2 has
little provision.

There is no immediate need for <DIV> from a browser/presentation
perspective, but once stylesheets, annotations, and more sophisticated
query facilities are added, it will be invaluable.

That's why I would like to see it in HTML sooner rather than later:
so that authors can mark up the hierarchical structure of
their documents and validate those documents against a stable,
published DTD. That way when (if?) Web technology is sophisticated
enough that such markup is useful, they won't need to re-tag their
documents to take advantage of the new functionality.

As for the specifics -- the content model and the contexts where
<DIV> is allowed -- it may happen that HTML 3.x or HTML 4.x will
want to enforce a stricter hierarchical organization. Personally,
I do not think this will be the case; <DIV> looks right as it is
currently specified. Anything more would be too rigid,
and anything less leaves no way to encode hierarchy at all.

--Joe English

joe@trystero.art.com